Month: August 2021
Rising Anger About Remote Work
At some of tech’s biggest companies i.e. Apple and Google, tensions around remote and hybrid work could be on the rise. Many employees want to work from home permanently, without taking any kind of pay cut while executives want their teams back in the physical. Some workers simply don’t want to come back to the
Disruptive Fintech Sector
Iron Bankers are the venture capitalists funding (any) incumbents’ enemies. The Iron Bank (GoT) is a metaphor for today’s financial institutions, if present-day banks didn’t need bailouts or to invent fake accounts to juice compensation. Regardless, it was well known throughout Braavos that The Iron Bank will have its due. It’s hard to imagine an
User-centered Design System
Like any other product, a design system is only as useful as it is usable. Design systems often start as a way for product organizations to increase their efficiency, consistency, and velocity. Organizations invest a lot of time and resources upfront into creating shared component libraries to bind design and engineering together. These resources live
Apple’s bug bounty system enough
Apple’s Security Bounty system rewards any researcher or company that can bring the company’s attention to vulnerabilities or exploitation techniques that could pose a security threat to users of the company’s operating systems. Apple’s bug bounty system was initially a private program but was opened to the public in 2019; the company has historically raised
war in Afghanistan
After two decades of occupation the US military began to withdraw from Afghanistan in February 2021, by August the Afghan government fled, foreign forces staged an emergency evacuation, and the Taliban captured the capital city of Kabul. The world is now left wondering what kind of regime the Taliban will build in Afghanistan, whether they
Sexual Abuse and Apple’s Proposal
Action on the circulation of child sexual abuse imagery is long overdue. Effective mechanisms to prevent the sharing of images and the robust prosecution of perpetrators should both receive the political priority they deserve. But Apple’s proposed measures fail to tackle the problem and provide the architecture for massive expansion of state surveillance. Historically, the
Prostitution as a Career
There are women who seem to choose prostitution as a career choice in order to overcome the crushing poverty and pitifully low wages; they can earn enough money in one hour that would take them a week to make if she were working in a supermarket, for example. Often this money supports her family. Also,
Covid-19 Colonialism
African access to Covid vaccines depends on World Bank loans. The World Bank website reveals the extent of loans which African nations have undertaken to buy vaccines: from large countries such as Ghana ($200 million), Ethiopia ($207 million) and Kenya ($130 million), to tiny countries such as Eswatini ($5 million), Gambia ($8 million), and São
Depressing CAPTCHA
CAPTCHA images are pictures of the outside world, but it’s a world that is unsettlingly bare of people. This is likely for privacy reasons, which is a laudable motive on Google’s part. But it winds up making the pictures look totally postapocalyptic. Each CAPTCHA depicts a world blasted by a neutron bomb, where the objects
international community coping with the Afghan migrant crisis
Kabul fell to the Taliban on the 15th August 2021, as the United States failed to pull out of Afghanistan on the Biden Administration’s crude intended date of September 11th 2021 and began to stage a swift evacuation. The world was shocked by images of Afghans trying to cling onto US military planes as they